Regensburg 2019 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 7: Social Systems, Opinion and Group Formation I

SOE 7.4: Vortrag

Montag, 1. April 2019, 16:45–17:00, H17

Accelerating dynamics of the public discussion — •Philipp Lorenz-Spreen¹, Sune Lehmann², and Philipp Hövel³ — ¹Max Planck Insitute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany — ²Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark — ³University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

With news pushed to smart phones in real time and social media reactions spreading across the globe in seconds, the public discussion can feel accelerated and temporally fragmented. In longitudinal datasets across various domains, covering a range of time spans, we find significantly increasing gradients and shortened periods in the trajectories of public attention.

Is this a consequence of recent developments or the inevitable conclusion of the way information is disseminated and absorbed by the public? Our findings support the latter hypothesis.

Using a simple mathematical model of competing topics, we are able to explain the empirical data remarkably well. Our modeling suggests that the accelerating ups and downs of content popularity are driven by increasing rates of creation and consumption of cultural items. The interplay of the ephemerality of attention and the competition for novelty causes growing turnover rates and shorter attention spans.